Ted Cruz Is Right About Drafting Women

John Allen Gay

Politics, Americas

Doubling the draft pool for political expediency is folly.

“I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree,” writes Tim O’Brien in his classic Vietnam War novel The Things They Carried. “He was using his thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so, he sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio.”

Should such experiences be reserved only for men?

Women are now eligible to serve in combat roles in the U.S. military. Does that mean they, like men, should be required to register for the Selective Service System, the government agency tasked with preparing for a possible military draft? ABC news reporter Martha Raddatz asked Republican presidential hopefuls that in Saturday night’s debate. The three candidates who responded—Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie—all favored forcing women to register for conscription. Christie even framed not forcing them to register as discrimination, and said that “we need to be a party and a people that makes sure that our women in this country understand anything they can dream, anything that they want to aspire to, they can do.”

Presumably few women aspire to get drafted, but I digress. Several in the conservative intelligentsia expressed shock at the apparent unanimity. Jay Nordlinger of National Review tweeted that “[a] country that sends its daughters, mothers, aunts, sisters, granddaughters into war is barbaric. A civilizational cord has been cut.” Amy Otto of the Federalist questioned the usefulness of the draft in assembling an effective military and pointed to evidence that “mixed-sex units are going to have more challenges and be less effective than single-sex units.”